Reading reaction 9-2

[jwolf]

Henry James’ “The Best in the Jungle”, is an enormous task to digest
within the mind. I would read the sentences, which seemed like
paragraphs themselves, and become trapped inside my own confusion. The
author to a degree seemed like he was trying to show off his
vocabulary and creativity to right poetic literature. It felt like
over kill. Henry James in my opinion was trying to be too
sophisticated and this made me indifferent to the story and a tad
aggravated. As I read these monstrous sentences, I split them into
parts. I tried to decipher and examine each phrase, but as soon I
thought I did, I would go onto the next part. The next part would
confuse me further and sometimes I felt it contradicted the previous
passage. The next part would throw me into a whole new direction in
which I could not recover. It confused me over and over again. I tried
to get on top of the story, and look at it by section, and then I
would become in tangled in it once more. I found myself pulling my
own hair out in frustration. One sentence, it reads “[i]t had ever
been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in it required
but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for
the hour as new” (464). I do not even know what to say to that quote.
It is unnecessarily confusing and a bit ridiculous. This is how I
pretty much felt about the whole story.